The Most Important Problem of our Lifetime
I was reading about Aaron Swartz and looking into his efforts to keep the internet open, unbiased, and free.
While doing that, I stumbled into a transcript of a speech given by Richard Hamming, and it radically altered my perspective on problem solving.
You and Your Research is a fantastic insight into what it means to do great work, and focus on important problems; straight from the mouth of someone on the Manhattan Project and acquainted with the many brilliant minds who built the bomb.
This didn’t automatically lead to me thinking about problems in a nuclear or physics sense. I don’t have a background in any of that. Most of my writings are on cultural issues.
So, then, what is a great problem in the 21st century? What is important work? It seems like we have a lot of problems. It might be hard to figure out what is worth the time.
Artificial Intelligence? Censorship? Surveillance? State-funded propaganda? Educational policy? Mental health? Water access for all? Healthcare for everyone? War prevention? Financial transparency for elected officials in the age of Monero? The degrading quality of internet platforms? A cure for cancer?
I have long been incapable of seeing the bigger picture and being able to drill down into what might actually constitute a great problem.
I’ve worked at large financial corporations. I’ve worked at quirky start-ups. I’ve worked on meaningful presidential campaigns. I’ve volunteered in some of the most forgotten inner cities in America. I’ve collaborated with very intelligent and capable people on a variety of projects. I like to think I’ve helped at least a few people along the way and had some influence on society. Nonetheless, my career has been chaotic, and I’ve never been passionate about a single thing I’ve worked on in a professional capacity.
Recently, I’ve also become aware of the work of Shujia Nakamur; the man who invented the Blue and White LED. It is reported that he worked 12 hours a day every single day by himself in a laboratory for months on end while defying upper managements orders to shut his project down. What drives a man to be that passionate? I’ve certainly never been employed to do something worth that kind of effort. I’m sure a lot of us can find common ground there.
I believe in God. I believe there is a reason for us being here. I believe we all have something to contribute. That doesn’t mean we will all live up to it, it just means the capacity is there for higher purpose.
All the arrows in my head have always been pointing to something. There must be something worth our time in this maddening modern time. Why is Nuclear Fusion the thing all those arrows seem to be pointing to? Most of us lack the technical ability to ever drill to the technical depths required to accomplish that goal, myself included at the moment.
Why would that be the most important problem of the 21st century?
Terraform the Earth
It is hard to say with any level of certainty, that most things people are spending their time on or making their living from will really do much in the long run.
At the end of the day, will the majority of the continents still be poor? Will we still be fighting for resources? Will we still be triaging after depletion? Does life actually change much for anyone on average?
Even Artificial Intelligence, with as much progress that is being made, hits an energy ceiling. We have limited energy. If something were to happen to our sources of energy, all progress in software would backslide immediately. Computers don’t work without electricity.
Food cannot be produced at the levels required to sustain billions of people without sufficient energy.
Hospitals don’t work without electricity either. As seen with the Blackouts in Lebanon and South Africa.
It turns out a lot of stuff breaks almost immediately when the lights go out.
Most of our energy sources are running on borrowed time.
It takes decades to build Nuclear Fission plants. Solar and Wind aren’t as magical as people expected them to be. Hydroelectric is good, but a surprisingly limited amount of jurisdictions have access to that. I do believe Fossil Fuels progressed society to where it stands today, but it is a finite resource and our energy demand is nothing short of infinite.
What if everyone, everywhere, has essentially unlimited access to energy. Regardless of the continent you live on , or how much energy your project or facility needs to consume, what if that stopped mattering? What if we had a repeatable, formulaic, way to produce and efficiently capture all the energy we could ever need - and do it in a way where we could quickly rebuild when things break?
What is described here, is permanently preventing the backslide of humanity into the dark ages, and breaking the energy ceiling for all endeavors going forward.
There would be no limit to how far we could push Artificial Intelligence. There would be no limit to how many hospitals we could build. There would be no limit to how much water we could purify. The electrification of vehicles immediately becomes viable. We wouldn’t need to be held hostage by dictators that commanded vital energy resources. The poorest community you can think of could use as much energy as the wealthiest community on earth. It wouldn’t matter what continent you were on. It’s hard to describe how monumental the consequences of accomplishing the efficient capture of nuclear fusion energy would be.
This is first-class work, by any generations standard.